Six years after he last bent the laws of groove and gravity, Thundercat keeps his eye on the ball with Distracted, an album that almost feels like a transmission beamed in from a future that hopefully we’ll see one day. If 2020’s It Is What It Is was a velvet-lined meditation on loss, Distracted comes across like a uncompromising argument with the present. The bass virtuoso has always dabbled in contradiction, stitching together silk-smooth jazz-funk with absurdist humor, but here the seams are more deliberate. The album circles a central tension. How do you stay human in a world that won’t stop challenging that?

A stacked guest list orbits the project, including A$AP Rocky, WILLOW, Tame Impala, Channel Tres, and Lil Yachty. But the feelings really hit hardest on a previously unreleased collaboration featuring Mac Miller, appearing like an apparition into the album’s neurons.

Much of Distracted was created alongside superproducer Greg Kurstin, whose pop résumé crosses genres and generations, from Adele to Paul McCartney. Their partnership is a curious one, with Kurstin’s polished instincts butting heads with Thundercat’s elusive, interstellar funk. Elsewhere, other guests like Flying Lotus, Kenny Beats, and the Lemon Twigs add their own touch, turning the album into a mixed bag that never quite settles into one shape.

Lyrically, Thundercat looks for the promise of progress and finds it… underwhelming to be perfectly honest. He riffs on Star Trek dreams of laser battles and deep-space exploration, only to land back on Earth, where innovation looks suspiciously like better phone cameras and more secret surveillance. It’s a running joke with a bitter aftertaste. The future, he suggests, isn’t quite what we were promised.

Still, Distracted isn’t just a doom scroll set to bass. It’s playful, twitchy, and full of musical detours that feel like daydreams fighting to stay awake. Thundercat doesn’t offer answers so much as he sketches it out for us. We’re all overstimulated, underwhelmed, and searching for something real in the static. At least in his world, the signal is still out there. We just have to listen past the noise.